Shifting American Policies Are Fragmenting Afghanistan

Nine months ago, General Stanley McChrystal warned his minister, Robert Gates, that without a radical change on the ground, the war in Afghanistan threatened to spiral out of control within a year.

In three months, we will meet this deadline.

In contrast to last summer, the U.S. and Allied campaign not only shows no signs of success, but it seems trapped in a logic of defeat.

McChrystal suggested shifting the focus from the war against the Taliban to the protection of civilians. At the same time, he was trying to make half a defeat appear as a victory, reporting some significant military success. And so he requested more soldiers in a bid to sharpen the tools of propaganda. His goal: “to Afghanize” the conflict and then entrust the locals with the responsibility of managing a country marked by three decades of war.

Obama gave him a good part of the required reinforcements, endorsed the strategy, but simultaneously announced the U.S. intention to withdraw in July 2011, in order to “de-Afghanize” the campaign in time for his re-election to the presidency. The most serious mistake committed by the president was to declare both attack and retreat in the same breath.

What is the result? All the actors in the conflict, whether direct or indirect, inside or outside Afghanistan, are making their calculations on the post-withdrawal. The first in line is President Karzai, who abandoned his American puppet status and took on a role of the fierce nationalist; he even proposed himself as a direct liaison to Mullah Omar and other insurgent leaders.

All of this is resulting in an increasingly fragmented battlefield. Among the Allies, the Dutch are about to leave and the Canadians will follow shortly. Many countries who got involved in the ISAF mission to please the Americans are seriously questioning whether to stay any longer in a theater even the U.S. deems unsuitable. In a galaxy of insurgents, Obama has scattered the players, and now there are at least a dozen fighting formations against the foreigners, well beyond just the Taliban.

Among the regional powers, India and Pakistan are sharpening their weapons to resolve the dispute over who has the right to exercise an indirect hegemony in Afghanistan, while Iran ponders the potential use of an Afghan territory in case of an Israeli/American aggression. As for the Russians, they would gladly pay the West to make them stay indefinitely in Afghanistan, hindering a possible expansion of Islamic radicalism in the weak underbelly of southern Russia. Beijing shares this fear with the Russians but appears shocked by the oscillations in Washington.

And what about us? Whenever an Italian soldier dies, light is once again shed on a mission that looks unpopular, or even worse, incomprehensible to the public. And after a while that light is turned off and we rely again on inertia until the next fatality. It’s never too late to realize that this passive attitude is unreasonable and dangerous. The government and the opposition should at least tell part of the truth about what exactly our soldiers are doing in Afghanistan. And above all, they must explain why they want to keep them there, preferably without hiding behind slogans.